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Topic: Power saving topic (Read 1216 times)

With power efficiency getting more and more a popular topic I thought it might be interesting to post a thread where people can post any suggestion they have to make a LinuxMCE home as power efficient as possible. I recently read some general power saving threads and there people aim at about 1000 kWh per year for a household. How nice if we can also achieve similar results without limiting the home automation and media comforts...

With power efficiency getting more and more a popular topic I thought it might be interesting to post a thread where people can post any suggestion they have to make a LinuxMCE home as power efficient as possible. I recently read some general power saving threads and there people aim at about 1000 kWh per year for a household. How nice if we can also achieve similar results without limiting the home automation and media comforts...

all ideas welcome!

The best advice here is to not use MD's but use upnp media players if your system is delivering video content. This decision means that you make a terrific energy saving over each MD (eg Atom based MD @ say 20W verses Media Player @ say 0.7W) and you can also down-size your Core too as the media players place far less load on the Core. So you might now be able to choose an Core that uses maybe 60% less energy than before. Obviously these are generalised savings and your specific mileage may vary but you will definitely make big savings with this approach.

If yes, would I be right in saying that this isn't integrated with LMCE in the true sense, i.e. it's controlled separately, and merely plays remote media that's made available to it?

Cheers,Matt.

Yes its a stand alone upnp media renderer (thats the technical description) and that would include media players, BlueRay player and in fact most SmartTV's too. In Dianemo installations now most customers are using SmartTV's or media players (if they are not replacing their TV's). All these devices are controlled over IP to varying degrees ie play/stop/fwd/rew/chan up/down/input select/vol up/down/Mute/standby on/off

How tightly integrated this is in LMCE currently I'm not sure but to some extent it would be. In Dianemo we have device templates for most major brands of media players, BlueRay players & SmartTV's too.

I did a quick back-of-a-fag-packet calculation for a 20W MD left on continuously for a month, and it costs about 65p. Mine switches on/off (OK, hibernates) when I arm/disarm the alarm, so it will be even less than that. Barely seems worth worrying about? Of course I am talking purely from a monetary point of view here, there is always the green argument.

However I appreciate it allows you to downsize the core, I have no idea how much juice my core is using.

I did a quick back-of-a-fag-packet calculation for a 20W MD left on continuously for a month, and it costs about 65p. Mine switches on/off (OK, hibernates) when I arm/disarm the alarm, so it will be even less than that. Barely seems worth worrying about? Of course I am talking purely from a monetary point of view here, there is always the green argument.

However I appreciate it allows you to downsize the core, I have no idea how much juice my core is using.

Cheers,Matt.

The overall savings are in fact much greater especially if your system is larger. If you assume about 80-90p per MD, plus say 450p savings on downsized Core, plus less cooling/ventilation in the centralised cupboard/rack of say 120p & less wear & tear on the other equipment in the cupboard/rack too - say another 55p. Add all that up and you have a saving of just over 700p per month or approx £85 UKP per year (these are all based on real numbers from real installations).

Obviously all installations are unique and no two properties are the same but some simple incremental savings can be delivered easily by making the right choices. We have customers who are saving in the region of £185 - £225 UKP per year ($300 to $360 USD per year) by doing this. Small savings can quickly accumulate.

Obviously there are other incremental effects like being able to forget about ventilation when your media player only outputs 0.7w of heat, compactness, simplicity & very importantly reliability - which is a big one in fact. Reducing complexity by removing MD's is effective at improving reliability for sure. When we looked at reliability events the most common issues were related to MD's. So removing them not only saves energy costs (and purchase costs relating to the MD hardware too) but also improves overall system reliability too.

Obviously I would never dream of saying "oh how I wish upnp media players were supported by LMCE, when will it be sorted" because that would simultaneously violate rules #1 and #2, but if they were supported I would certainly consider it from what you are saying.

I guess if you run cameras then you will always struggle to downsize your core? Is there anything else that would make down-sizing the core difficult?

Obviously I would never dream of saying "oh how I wish upnp media players were supported by LMCE, when will it be sorted" because that would simultaneously violate rules #1 and #2, but if they were supported I would certainly consider it from what you are saying.

I guess if you run cameras then you will always struggle to downsize your core? Is there anything else that would make down-sizing the core difficult?

Cheers,Matt.

Yes running motion on your Core (or any system) will increase energy usage. But as UpdateMedia is running continuously essentially its likely that motion has a lesser effect energy wise. In Dianemo we are transitioning away from hosting motion on the Core and will start using small, low energy, dedicated IP Security camera PVR's. These use 5-10 watts each and are Linux based with typically ARM based processors. The Core then interacts with the Camera PVR over IP for control and events/alerts. This is all part of a general trend we have of moving these kinds of services off to dedicated low energy hardware and focusing the Core back to providing the logic & control.

Re UPnP Controller @LinuxMCE: As far as I know, the code has not been committed into LinuxMCE atm. I might have missed it, but I do not think so. totallymaxed probably has the definitive answer.

Thats a different approach, but an interesting one. In this approach each 'Advanced IP Camera' manages its own events and services and motion is not running centrally at all. Some dedicated IP Camera PVR's (eg Camera Servers) also manage their IP based cameras this way too with the PVR simply getting events from each Camera when something happens local to the camera.

In the future Dianemo we will have a 'External Camera Server' device that will get events from the Camera Server when a motion event is triggered by a Camera. How the camera server manages its cameras is abstracted in our case. The objective is to lessen the load on the Core and therefore allow us to shrink the hardware required at the Core, and lower energy usage. At the same time this improves reliability and is more fault tolerant too.